Option to search only within highlighted text

Plugins ideas
1

I would love to have an option in the Search tool, to search only within text that is highlighted (==).

Use case:

  1. Collect lots and lots of text

  2. Go back through and highlight most useful/relevant bits

  3. Current: search results will include text I did not highlight, which is less needed/relevant.

  4. Desired: Search only within the highlighted text.
    Goal: have fewer, better search results, avoid being overwhelmed by many many results from a search.

My story: I am using Obsidian to collect a lot of research for a book. I would like to collect passages from books and articles fairly indiscriminately, copying them into notes in Obsidian. The result will be a huge amount of text in many notes spread throughout my vault.

If I search within all that text, I’ll get many many results, making it difficult to look through them to find what I need.

So I imagine an intermediate step, plus this new search option:

  • Intermediate step: I go back through all the text I’ve collected, highlighting what’s most useful (this would take a while; that’s fine).

  • Finally, I use this new/proposed search option to search within only the text I’ve highlighted.

Result: fewer, high-quality/relevant search results.

I was not able to find anything like this that already exists - though possible I missed it, apologies if so.

Thank you for any suggestions/wisdom!

Robin

3 Likes
2

As a workaround for now you might consider extracting or copying highlights to highlight-only notes that you can target in search (probably by tagging them or putting them in a folder). I think there’s an Extract Highlights plugin that might help.

3

Excellent idea - thank you!